How Veronica Mars Learned Patience
by Paradoqz
Summary: She has to go after him because she does.


TITLE: How Veronica Mars Learned Patience

AUTHOR: Doqz  
>SHOW: Veronica Mars<br>ARCHIVE: Please ask.  
>DISCLAIMER: Main characters mentioned belong to Rob Thomas andor CBS . No profit is being made.

The summer passes uneventfully and so does the first week of her sophomore experience. The entire ridiculousness of her first year in a university slowly recedes into the background, taken over by the urgent immediacies of the last minute schedule changes, buying the books, arranging housing – while tracking the deadbeat husband and father of two.

Nobody cares about the video anymore. Pretty much as she expected. In the age of the Reality TV, her foray into web porn is fairly unremarkable, as such things go. Veronica is rather content with that, as it happens. The faint air of disreputability does remain, but that's all right too. It's a like a security blanket, at this point. It makes Hearst feel almost like home.

Logan comes by rarely, just enough to keep up but carefully rationing the visits to make it clear that he's backed off. It sets her teeth on edge for some reason but Veronica's summer resolution is a firm promise to put a good kibosh on the Echolls family making her any crazier than she already is.

She holds to that. They hang out. They nod at each other from across the quad. He sends her a link to a dancing panda that explodes on command. She sends him the picture of the deadbeat dad having that zipper accident.

It's all horrifyingly mundane and normal enough to make her want to scream.

Logan and Piz make peace in a way that guys seem to think is terribly mysterious and manlike. Funny – she beat the crap out of Logan on any number of occasions. Somehow it never made them buddies.

Days pass and she contemplates letting go of the last, stubborn, vicious dregs of fear. But she can't. She is a Mars. And it's in her blood, it's who she is, her entire life is anchored to a very simple lesson learned for ever and long ago – actions have consequences, and most of the time people will live down to your expectations.

She brings it up with Logan finally, frustrated enough to talk to him, really talk for once. But he shrugs and firmly changes topics.

Veronica thinks of bugging his room, really does think about it, has mikes and cameras picked out in her head before she remembers her resolution and walks it off. She breathes deeply and distances. Like a mature adult and everything.

Semester grinds on as do her private wars. Nothing is settled and everything is normal.

When it is all over and she has time to think, she decides that Logan expected something. The scion of Neptune's dark elite he knows guys like Sorokin, knows what their threat means. He just doesn't care. He wants them to come for him, to have something to hit, to rage against, to hate with clear, unambiguous simplicity. Anything that isn't his father. Or himself.

It all seems so clear then. After. The definition of not in time.

Actions have consequences. And humiliating the baby prince of the Russian Mob has more than most. What Logan thinks, what plans he has for dealing with the car bomb, or crowbar-wielding thugs, or a simple drive-by… Veronica is never made privy to.

And in the end it doesn't matter anyway. Because they come at him through Trina.

Her mad drive to the hospital traumatizes Mac, whose car she borrows, and costs Veronica her driver's license for six months. She makes it there just in time to catch him, right as he leaves the building.

Logan just turns, faintly puzzled at her hand grasping his sleeve and gently, finger by finger, removes it. Smiles absently and pats her shoulder, kisses Mac – blotchy and red with tears - and then just walks off. Silent and focused, so focused.

She does bug his hotel room then. And his car. And Dick's, whom she browbeats into nightly reports, badgering relentlessly until he flinches every time her number comes up on the caller id.

But Logan walks through all of it like a somnambulist, untouched and seemingly untouchable. He makes all the arrangements, the guards are posted in the hospital around the clock, the best surgeons and psychologists are flown in.

He accepts the condolences gracefully and endures the inevitable press. He does everything right. And when Sorokin, his bruises finally faded, smiles at him across the food court and comes up to shake his hand and wish Trina the best… Logan smiles back. Still focused. So focused.

A cold and ugly premonition settles somewhere in her chest then. She knows Logan. Knows him as well as anyone can and better then all. Knows every side of him, the hated and the loved. Oh, she knows him.

But this Logan, this distanced, calculating, untouchable and armored in a whole new way… He smiles at Sorokin and Veronica wants to scream, shriek, point and wail like a cheerleader with a bad preg-test.

How can they not see it? It's so obvious, it's so – there. He shakes his hand!

Logan Echolls, the damaged scion of Neptune's dangerous paradise, Logan who never turns the other check. Doesn't know how, would never want to learn.

Logan Echolls the walking impulse machine. Logan who has never _planned_ before.

Something new and horrible is coming, is blooming and flowering with poisonous precision even as he smiles and thanks Sorokin. And she's the only one who sees.

Her Dad listens, but does not believe. And the cops are worse than useless as always. Proof, they tell her. Bring us proof.

Not with all the press around him, her Dad tries to calm her. He's too smart. He'll wait, at the very least.

She lets herself be convinced. But in the back of her brain she knows it is all an illusion. Even this new and scary Logan- No, he won't wait.

Perhaps in the brief and mad time they had together she teaches him too well. Perhaps he learns by osmosis throughout the rest of years. Perhaps he hires help. She doesn't know how, but he does it and she is not even the first to know.

Sorokin will live, they say. Sort of.

And Logan's alibi is perfect. Her own equipment exonerates him, as do about a dozen witnesses. This infuriates her almost as much as the rest, because she doesn't know how he did it, but she knows that there was no hired labor here.

Too personal and too important.

His condolence wreath is lovely and impeccable, as is his escape. By the time the tasteful flower arrangement reaches Sorokin's room - Logan is gone, a ghost.

There's never a question that she will go after him. She knows it and so does Dad. Even Piz does, his eyes hurt, and understanding, and everything she has no time for anymore. She has to go after him. It's not an obligation or a duty. She will not track him to see the justice done or because he thwarted her. It goes beyond all that now.

Oh, she will punch him and he will bleed for being this unbelievable fucking moron, for making everything so stupid. But that's all just incidentals. She has to go after him because she does.

But she can't.

He is not even on the cop radar, the case is never even brought against him. The Sorokins want it handled their own way. They understand blood-debts. But so does Logan. And he prepares well.

And so they watch her. The clumsy, amateurish tails, the electronic gear that she can pick up with her ancient cell. Footprints of gorillas treading in her jungle. But they watch her, and Trina, and even Mac. They are not as good as she is, but they have money and they have time and purpose, and she is trapped, caged, chained to Hearst. And so she learns patience.

Not the patience she learned from Dad in the hell year when she was made. And not the patience she built herself, marking time until the graduation and the moment of flipping Neptune off forever. No, this patience is new and deep, cold and sure, rooted somewhere within where she does not care to look too closely.

Veronica can be calculating too. And so she plans, and makes her own masks. For teachers, for friends and petty, silly enemies littering her path, as she slides through the months of college that stretch like molasses. She waits, reveling in her patience, and learns to appreciate the trap caging her in place.

She waits and plans and carefully, lightly, softly she learns. Not about Logan. She kills the very thought of a temptation, no matter how innocuous it might appear. No. Logan ceases to matter in the short term; he is locked securely away in a strongbox, her mind warded against him, No. Logan Echolls will wait until she's ready, until it's time.

No, she draws on her patience and her cold, cold focus. She looks ahead. Veronica will find him. Sure as sure. Any other outcome is too ridiculous to contemplate. But what next? What is the step beyond the step?

And so she learns. Everything and anything about the Sorokin syndicate. Quietly, oh so quietly. Carefully, softly and with subtlety she never thought she had. She watches them watch her and smiles. And waits and learns. She tracks their money and their people, she knows their bosses and their flunkies. She collects their enemies and maps their allies. And is not at all surprised when she is led, inexorably, back to the Castle.

The net grows, but she has time. And she has purpose too. And so she learns and plans. It takes longer than even she expected, but inevitable happens and they begin to slack, routine sets in. They watch her but they cease to expect results. And as soon as they blink, she makes her move.

She has it worked out almost from the beginning. Because Veronica knows him. And in the end, dim though Logan Echolls is, he will get there too. He learns to hide well, but he won't. Not forever. And eventually he will hit out again. Wherever he can, whenever he finally slips his mind's leash and let that Echolls rage free.

She knows him, yes. But there's also this new Logan to account for, The cold, focused planner, who had smiled back at Sorokin. She is playing chess with Logan now. Chess across time and shadows; anticipating moves and discarding her anticipations. Conflating Logan she knows and whoever he has become. Might become. Is becoming.

But she is good at chess. So she makes her guess and banks on Logan. She doesn't have to find him. If she's right he is already found. Waiting. If he's smart enough. She just has to believe that he is - smart enough to see what she has seen. To see the center and the fulcrum of it all.

She bets on him. Her one window of opportunity – maybe her life – she bets it all on him, one last time.

Besides. She has always wanted to go to Hawaii.

It a small island but there's still upwards of a million people crammed into it and Logan is smart enough not to try to lose himself the surfers. If he still surfs at all. So she sheds the first instinct and sticks to the plan. Stake out the target not the hunter.

There are upwards of a million people into it but it's still a small island. It doesn't take long to figure the players. To calculate the angles of going it alone or trusting people she's never met. Never met but knows. Knows like the back of her hand. Knows because they have been blindly navigating the same minefield she has but from a different direction.

So in the end it's not much of a risk at all. And one balmy, perfect Honolulu night she walks into O'Shaughnessy's, grins at Danny and lets Chin buy her a beer.


End file.
